The goal of the City Studies Project is to provide the public with periodic reports of academic performance for public K-12 schools in selected cities across the United States.
We hope to provide stakeholders who are invested in education solid information to evaluate and discuss the performance of schools in the cities we study.
The City Studies project examines how schools in each of selected cities perform overall and by student group.
Schools’ academic performance is defined by the average academic progress of students from one year to the next. By focusing on academic growth, we can understand the unique contributions of schools to student success while accounting for differences in student groups (such as socioeconomic status) which can influence performance.
Analyses for the project consider the performance of students grouped in a variety of ways. We examine student performance for:
Our analyses compare the academic performance of these various student groups in the city to average statewide academic performance. We also compare the performance of charter school students (and magnet or innovation school students, where applicable) to the performance of similar district students within the city. We control for student characteristics when making those comparisons.